I was searching for some information on swatch this afternoon, which led me to the Gentoo wiki. In the past I've found the Gentoo wiki to be quite a good source of information (for a range of topics, including many non-Gentoo specific tips), so imagine my surprise when I discovered this:

At this time I'm going to have to call the former site a loss. I'll post shortly on what will come next.

You guys can stop harassing Skiplink now, thanks for the sentiment though

If I were to sum up in one word why it has come to this it would be SPITE.

The full story: I have left out bits and pieces of the story so far because I did not want to sound mean to anyone who may or may not help me in the future and may be reading this (Hi Robert). However it has come to a point where I am on my own with little recourse; so I might as well tell everything I know. The story I have pieced together from people at TelX, emails form people in the building, people at 55 Marietta (Skiplink's new building) and other people who just know things.

It all began a while ago, TelX at 56 Marietta in Atlanta was overcharging Skiplink for space and hydro. Skiplink did what I would have done and decided to move (to 55 Marietta), to get the serves out quick. After moving a decent portion of his servers to the new facility TelX noticed and decided to extort some more money out of him before he left. Skiplink would of course not pay the extortion money so TelX shut off his cage and locked him out of the building.

At this point I come into the story and find my servers turned off. After several days of attempting to contact Skiplink via cell phone, office phone, text message, email, and IM my frustration grew. I had already restored most of my clients DNS and whatever backups I had available on to other servers and I was getting nowhere with Skiplink. Seeing as I was already starting to get a few emails from some resourceful googlers ad put up this temporary site. Emails rolled in with offers of support and help (thanks BTW) and a few emails with bits and pieces of information to tide me over.

Skiplink finally texted me with some minimal information, I basically took it as a "fuck you you're not important enough to warrant warning or details of what is going on". With that I at least hoped he was moving his servers, mine was just last on the list. Oh I was last on the list, but I wasent being moved; <Rant>I guess paying the equivalent of my mortgage in servers every month dosent make me important</Rant>. I received an email from some helpful users that gave me the information in the 1st paragraph so I called TelX.

TelX was somewhat helpful and was willing to accommodate me getting back my data (Skiplink would later call it extortion). They were willing to hook my machine up to a network and let me copy things off, or power up the entire cage and hope for the best. this would have cost me a bit of money but I and some of my clients would have gladly paid it. However i had gleaned at this point that Skiplink had already turned off the outside networks to the cage so powering it up would be useless. But I still had the option of hooking up the boxes directly, if i only knew which were mine.

After about a day and a half of pleading to Skiplink to give me something identifiable about the servers he refused saying "No they will not [power up the servers], we are in dispute with amounts owed". Adding "This has to be handled properly via appropriate channels." I asked further about getting some info about the servers and was told "Again it is all our equipment... You will have to wait on removal of your euipment". There was no more texting for a while and I got no more information out of skiplink for days.

This morning I finally chatted with Skiplink over IM and reiterated my request that he allow me to access my data via TelX as proxy. Skiplink was very adamant that the hardware was his and that TelX could not touch it. I informed him that they have said otherwise and would allow me access to the servers (for a fee) if i could determine which servers were mine. Skiplink went over the legal-ness of this with me, said TelX was extorting him and now me, telx has no right to hold his property, and in essence said that he would not help me. He also made it clear that he will not personally sue to get the equipment, or pay the fee of $25,000 TelX says he owes to retrieve the equipment. His last ditch effort was to send someone who had a collocated box on floor 2 to retrieve it and hope he was allowed onto floor 8 with my servers (and other peoples). I have not heard anything from him as of yet and can only assume he has failed.

And that brings us to today, October 23rd and exactly 1 week after the servers went down. To summarize my serves are in limbo, I have little legal recourse as I am in canada and don't actually own any physical property in this case. Skiplink will not tell me which servers are mine simply to spite TelX for wronging him. The wiki had no recent backups ( I have a backup of the content but not the users or other data from March thanks to a helpful user ). Gentoo-Portage I have a full code base backup, but none of the user content. and lastly I am exhausted from lack of sleep.

Final Rant: Skiplink is acting childish, has been completely unprofessional about the whole matter, and has been an ass about the whole thing. They should have told me what happened the day it happened, not a few text messages and a full explanation a full 1 week later. I will NEVER recommend their services to anyone, and will actively encourage current users to move their servers elsewhere.

Thanks to everyone who has emailed me over the past week, you have kept me from going completely insane and I thank you whole heartedly. The wiki will be back, it will be better stronger and most importantly properly backed up (my plan for moving forward will come in the next hour or so).

P.S. to the other people with servers stuck with mine and have emailed me. I feel for you and I will keep this space updated with as much info as I can.

Mike Valstar - Apologizing to everyone for not having off-site backups in place.

Hmmm. Actually, I know Robert who owns Skiplink. Fact is, he's a pretty good guy and hooked me up with some deals for a project (which unfortunately turned out to be short-lived because of the nature of politics.)

Still, kind of annoying to see someone ranting about someone who actually works hard to run an internet services business in today's day and age when such things are largely dominated by major corporations who provide crap service, but get away with it because people don't expect any better from such major corporations.

I've been in situations like the poster's before, and in the end, there isn't much you can do. The big providers have the resources to own the data centers and want to screw the smaller ones out of business so that they can take it for themselves.